Tech Meme

Debby Wu / Bloomberg: TSMC reports Q4 revenue up 43% YoY to ~$20.6B, below ~$20.8B analyst estimates, its first miss in two years; TSMC stock dropped 27% in 2022 but is up 8% in 2023  —  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s fourth-quarter sales missed analysts’ estimates, signaling the global decline … Lees verder op Tech Meme

David Shepardson / Reuters: New Jersey and Ohio ban TikTok on government-owned and managed devices; New Jersey’s governor plans to ban products from 12+ vendors including Huawei and ZTE  —  New Jersey and Ohio said on Monday they were joining other states in banning use of the popular video app TikTok on government-owned and managed devices. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Semafor: Sources: Microsoft is in talks to invest $10B in OpenAI at a $29B valuation, taking 75% of OpenAI’s profits until the investment is recouped and then owning 49%  —  Microsoft has been in talks to invest $10 billion into the owner of ChatGPT, the wildly popular app that has thrilled casual users … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Microsoft unveils VALL-E, a text-to-speech AI model trained on 60K hours of English speech that can simulate a person’s voice from three seconds of sample audio  —  Text-to-speech model can preserve speaker’s emotional tone and acoustic environment.  —  On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Microsoft acquires Fungible, which makes data processing units for data centers and has raised over $300M; reports from December say the deal is worth ~$190M  —  In December, reports suggested that Microsoft had acquired Fungible, a startup fabricating a type of data center hardware known … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Damir Yalalov / Metaverse Post: VALL-E: Microsoft’s new zero-shot text-to-speech model can duplicate everyone’s voice in three seconds  —  Since the release of the first text-to-speech (TTS) model, researchers have been looking for ways to improve the way these systems generate speech.  The latest model from Microsoft … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Juro Osawa / The Information: Sources: Douyin e-commerce spending in China grew 76% YoY to ~$208B in 2022; TikTok users in Southeast Asia more than quadrupled their spending to $4.4B in 2022  —  TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is making inroads in e-commerce.  Consumers in China last year spent 1.41 trillion yuan … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Mitchell Clark / The Verge: Meta plans to stop releasing software updates and drop some social features for the original Quest, which debuted in 2019, but will fix critical bugs until 2024  —  Meta is planning to stop supporting the original Quest VR headset with new software updates, and soon anyone using the older hardware … Lees verder op Tech Meme

VentureBeat: Dallas-based Worlds, whose “digital twins” of industrial companies’ floor operations help boost productivity, raised a $21.2M Series A1 led by Moneta Ventures  —  Worlds Enterprises, a company that builds digital twins of floor operations for industrial companies to let them become … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Jon Fingas / Engadget: Meta rolls out a Variance Reduction System, its AI ad-targeting tech meant to comply with its DOJ settlement and reduce discrimination in housing ads, in the US  —  Meta is acting on its vow to reduce ad discrimination through technology.  The company is rolling out a Variance Reduction System … Lees verder op Tech Meme